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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how a volunteer organization will achieve the culture and technical maturity to make human rated hardware without a high probability of a horrible death. Think about all the conditions in a long chain of events that must all go right, in a launch, to avoid cooking, freezing, squishing, cratering, asphyxiating, poisoning, exploding, or drowning your crew.

After decades of practice, NASA ended up under 1:100 odds of mishap at the end of the Shuttle program, with some estimates at 1:25. It would be fair to say all space programs need to go through a learning period where you blow a lot of things up and discover all the failure modes. SpaceX ate through several billion dollars on this path, before dialing in their launcher reliability, and they still don't think they're ready for humans.

How will CS do all this learning and get everything right?

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Maybe that's not their primary goal? People have taken horrifying risks to push frontiers throughout history. The Oregon Trail claimed an estimated 21,000 lives.* Perhaps they are willing to accept a higher risk of death?

*Though, despite the horrific toll, the final odds of death on the O.T., once the dust had settled, were about 5% to NASA's ~4%.

I don't see why a volunteer organization should be held at the same standards that a tax funded agency -wrongfully imo- is. They can do whatever they want with their lives.

It should be noted that, being strictly suborbital, both the challenges and risks are orders of magnitude lower than even a launch to LEO, and that unlike many space programs, they have quite a bit of prior history and information to draw on. I don't know whether this will be enough to reduce risk to near-NASA levels, however.

I am curious as to whether those odds cited are of partial successes, safely-aborted launches, or fatal failures.

Indeed, and things like micro controllers and materials have come a long way since the 60ties..

It's by no means cheap or trivial, but a lot of technology have been democratized since the 60ties..

Climbing the Everest has a 1:10 chance of death, yet many people try their luck every year. It's the same thing.

Fair, although I feel like with Everest, the fact that it's so risky is part of the point. Like, if hiking up Everest was perfectly safe, would people still treat it as some huge accomplishment?

I feel like you’re implying things are different with space flight, but I feel like they’re the same, no?

I think Copenhagen Subobital might agree with you :)

> When Edmund Hillary was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest he replied: “Because it’s there”.

https://copenhagensuborbitals.com/about-us/

And yet everyday you (and everyone else) get in a car with much higher risk of death.

Why the double standard for experimental space fight?

Do you really think car travel has a 1/100 chance of death, or is this a whoosh moment for me?

They've got their statistics confused.

Lifetime odds (in US) of death due to vehicle accident is 1/102. (https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit...)

But that's average lifetime odds, not mortality rate per journey. It's a statistic with a very different meaning. But I see how people get confused by all the different ways risk can be expressed.

I do not think a trip in a car is that dangerous, but I recently ran across an article that suggested going to the hospital has approximately a 1/140 chance of death due to medical error, for what that's worth. That's per visit, not per lifetime.

"based on a total of 35,416,020 hospitalizations, 251,454 deaths stemmed from a medical error, which the researchers say now translates to 9.5 percent of all deaths each year in the U.S"

https://hub.jhu.edu/2016/05/03/medical-errors-third-leading-...

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